I have some cron jobs that are taking a might long time. That is because they are screen scrapers and I inserted an extra long pause (10 minutes between screens) to be extra polite and minimize network traffic. I was going to have them run once a day but now I'm thinking once a week.

How do I tell when a cron job has completed? I've been looking at the logs but they are very large and sometimes exceed emac's maximum capacity.

How can I insert logic to prevent a new instance of the cron job starting before the old one is finished?

Thanks,
Siegfried

create a file in the /tmp directory and have your script check for it. If it is there then dont start. If it is not there then start and delete the file when you're done.

look into 'fuser'